August 2010

I’ve fielded a number of requests recently asking how to interrogate a file within SSIS and change the processing rules based on the metadata of said file. A recent forum poster specifically asked about using the foreach loop to iterate through the files in a directory and, on a per-file basis, either process the file or skip the file if…

Last weekend I went to Baton Rouge (by way of New Orleans) to attend and speak at the second annual SQL Saturday event there. This event was my third of four scheduled SQL Saturday of the summer. I flew out of Love Field in Dallas with fellow Dallas SQL Server pros Sean McCown and Tim Costello, and we met up…

Unless you’ve spent the last two days hiding under a rock, you’ve heard the uproar around this week’s development in the PASS board election. The Nominating Committee (NomCom) published the list of candidates who will be on the ballot for this year’s three open board positions. Five candidates made the cut; two did not. The buzz – mostly negative –…

First, apologies to those of you outside the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area… I’ve backed off from using my blog as a mouthpiece for local announcements, but we’ve got a couple of things going on that need some additional publicity. Mailing List Changes Those who are engaged with our e-mail distribution list know that we’ve had some issues with our listserv…

The second annual SQL Saturday Baton Rouge event is coming up in less than two weeks! Have you registered? I’m honored to be speaking at this event again this year. I’ll be presenting an introductory SSIS class (one of the 7:30 early bird sessions). Later in the morning I’ll be delivering a talk on expressions and configurations in SSIS, one…

There are some questions that can’t necessarily be answered in a book or a training video. Those are often the questions revolving around “why?” rather than “how?”. A prime example from my own experience is my lack of understanding of the criticality of transaction isolation levels. As a very green SQL Server professional (and in this case, I define professional…